Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with independent authors of commercial fiction, particularly crime, thriller and mystery writers.
​
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and an Associate Member of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA).

You don't need a lot of equipment to create superb audio content. A fellow book editor and I recently recorded 5 episodes for our podcast with nothing but a couple of mics, a splitter and our cell phones. Here's how to do it.

Mobile podcasting at ATOMICON
Denise Cowle and I were at ATOMICON, a one-day digital marketing conference hosted by my two favourite marketers, Andrew and Pete.

The venue was the Assembly Rooms in Newcastle. 300 business owners, all with an interest in being visible online, gathered from near and far to learn, and have a good laugh doing it – Andrew and Pete don’t do anything without putting a smile on people’s faces!

Creating content ... while learning about creating content
In January, Denise and I launched The Editing Podcast. We're both experienced book editors and we use our knowledge and experience to make indie authors' publishing journeys easier by offering writing and editing tips, tools and guidance.

We tackle editing issues from the viewpoint of print and digital publishing because we recognize that our listeners work in a variety of formats and use a range of platforms to distribute their writing.

Now, we'd already planned to invite guests onto The Editing Podcast in Season 2 and beyond, but ATOMICON was too good an opportunity to miss.

​Since some of the 300 delegates had published books – fiction and non-fiction – we thought it would be great to hear their experiences of the editing and publishing process so that other indie authors might understand the various approaches taken and the challenges faced.

EDITORS DENISE COWLE AND LOUISE HARNBY WITH AUTHOR TIM LEWIS

The question we asked ourselves was could we do it on the fly? The coffee breaks were short, the venue busy, and the atmosphere buzzing. That meant there’d be a lot of background noise to contend with.

What equipment did we use?
We turned up in Newcastle with our very own micro podcasting studio! It consisted of the following:

2 x RØDE Smartlav+ mics; one for us and one for each of our interviewees (available on Amazon for £39.99)

1 x RØDE SC6; allows the connection of two mics to one iPhone (available on Amazon for £11.15)

That’s a small investment for an audio studio that fits in your pocket! And we can use the equipment over and over.

​So did it work?
Yes, it did! RØDE didn’t disappoint. We plugged in the mics, hit the RECORD button on the Reporter app, and away we went.
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Our voices come across clearly, and while the background noise of the convention is audible, it doesn't interfere with the conversation. In fact, we think it adds texture to the recordings because listeners can appreciate the atmosphere of a live event.

Who did we talk to?
The following lovely people were kind enough to let us interview them about their book revision and publication journeys:
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You can listen to the bonus POINT OF VIEW episodes on The Editing Podcast via your preferred podcatcher.

Editing and publishing the recordings
The recordings are .WAV files that sit in the Reporter app’s library. Download them to your computer or email them to yourself.
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We edit our audio files in Audacity – this is free, open-source, cross-platform audio-editing software. The dashboard does have something of a NASA feel to it, but it’s easy to learn how to do the basics with any number of free tutorials available on YouTube.

To upload to most audio platforms, you’ll need to convert the WAVs to MP3s. You can do this in Audacity at export stage.

​Publishing audio content
Denise and I chose Libsyn to syndicate our podcast content because it’s cheap as chips ($5 per month for the basic package) but still enables – post set-up – automatic delivery to the following:

You don’t have to go down that route, of course. If you’re creating audio content more sporadically for the purpose of author book promotion or to communicate your editing knowledge/services, you could go direct to, say, SoundCloud or another free audio-streaming service, and embed the audio on your website rather than going for full syndication. And it won’t cost you a penny.

That enables authors to connect with readers, and editors to connect with authors.

When a conversation takes place, listeners can hear that connection, and enjoy it. Lots of The Editing Podcast's listeners have told me and Denise that they love not just the learning points we share but also the way our friendship plays out on air. It's a richer experience than words alone can provide.

Learn how to do marketing better
We had a great time at ATOMICON, and our mobile podcasting experiment was a huge success, with over 300 downloads of the author interviews in the first 2 hours of appearing on air.

​If you’re struggling to be visible online, Andrew and Pete will show you the way. Denise and I are heading back toATOMICON in 2020. I'm certain we'll be doing more mobile podcasting, too!

​Click on the image below if you fancy joining us.

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with independent authors of commercial fiction, particularly crime, thriller and mystery writers.
​
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and an Associate Member of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA).

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with independent authors of commercial fiction, particularly crime, thriller and mystery writers.
​
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and an Associate Member of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA).

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with independent authors of commercial fiction, particularly crime, thriller and mystery writers.
​
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and an Associate Member of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA).

In this post, I outline the start of the author–editor relationship – from first contact, to initial discussion, to booking confirmation. My process is personal to my business but it gives you an idea of what to expect.

1. The author makes contactClients are welcome to contact me via email, social media, telephone or my contact form. Most use the latter.

My contact form is basic because I want authors to be able to start a conversation with me as easily as possible. The biggest stumbling block is usually the time frame because I’m booked up months in advance. Establishing when they’d like the editing or proofreading carried out is therefore essential, as is the word count. It’s those two pieces of information that will guide me on best fit at this point.

I include a dropdown menu so that authors can quickly choose the service they’re looking for: a full line and copyedit, a mini line critique or a proofread.

I ask for a little information about the project, too. This is where an author can tell me about the genre of their novel and provide a brief summary of the project.

I also ask for a name and email address – nothing more in terms of personal details. An underpinning principle of GPDR compliance requires business owners to collect only necessary data. For me, the name and email is enough to enable me to reply to the query.

Screenshot of contact form

2. The project discussion
Now the author and I begin to talk. The focus at this stage tends to be on time frame, the type of editing required, and the price (subject to seeing a sample). There might be a little back and forth as we get to know each other and agree the terms of the editing project.

If the author sent a sample with their email, I’ll review it before responding. This is the perfect opportunity for me to check that the service they’ve asked for is a good fit for what I think the text requires. It also gives me a chance to get a feel for the writing style ... to see whether I can get under the skin of the novel and give the story the sentence-level pop the author’s seeking.

A sample helps me work out how long the editing will take too. With that information, I can determine the fee. If you want more information about samples, Denise Cowle and I cover this topic in Episode 6 of The Editing Podcast.

I sometimes include links to useful resources on my website if I think they'll help the author decide whether I’m a good fit for them.

You can access everything on offer via my Writing Resources page but the 3 tools I most often refer to during this discussion phase are:

3. Booking the editing project
Once the author and I have decided we want to work together, and agreed a price and completion date, it’s time to confirm the booking.

​I ask them to read my terms and conditions (which are designed to protect us both), then fill in the booking-confirmation form (scroll to the bottom of the T&Cs web page if you want to have a look at it).

Receipt of that form triggers me to send an invoice for the booking fee that will secure the author’s slot in my schedule.

Screenshot of booking-confirmation form

4. Preparing for the edit: styles and files
There’s an Author Style Preferences form next to the booking-confirmation form in which clients can register any decisions they’d like me to adhere to during the editing or proofreading process. These aren’t set in stone and can be changed at any time before the editing begins.

Authors are welcome to send me their book file at any time once the booking has been confirmed. My only stipulation is that it arrives 24 hours before editing begins. This gives me time to check that the file can be opened and edited.​I hold the files securely in my Dropbox account, which is protected via two-factor authentication.

5. Reminding the author about the start date
I like to give my authors a little nudge at least a week before the start date. Editing will usually have been booked many months earlier and I might not be top of mind if the client is busy with other commitments. A nudge costs nothing and is invariably appreciated by time-poor authors.

If I’ve already received the book file, the reminder is simply a courtesy to let them know I’m about to start working on their project, and to check that the file hasn’t been revised in the meantime. Otherwise, it’s a reminder of the date by which the author needs to deliver the file.

Summing up
Editors work in a variety of ways. The process I’ve outlined here might look very different to my colleagues’. Still, it gives you an idea of what to expect when you get in touch with me.

If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a line. In the meantime, help yourself to the freebies. You don’t even have to hand over your email address to access them – just click and grab.

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with independent authors of commercial fiction, particularly crime, thriller and mystery writers.
​
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and an Associate Member of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA).

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with independent authors of commercial fiction, particularly crime, thriller and mystery writers.
​
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and an Associate Member of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA).

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with independent authors of commercial fiction, particularly crime, thriller and mystery writers.​She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and an Associate Member of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA).

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with independent authors of commercial fiction, particularly crime, thriller and mystery writers.​She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and an Associate Member of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA).

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with independent authors of commercial fiction, particularly crime, thriller and mystery writers.
​
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and an Associate Member of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA).

In this episode of The Editing Podcast, Denise and Louise demystify publishing language – the terms professionals use to describe the parts of a book – so that you can talk with confidence about your text.

Click to listen to Episode 2

Can we ask a favour of you? Would you rate and review us on iTunes, please? It would mean a lot to us. Thank you!

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with independent authors of commercial fiction, particularly crime, thriller and mystery writers.
​
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and an Associate Member of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA).

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with independent authors of commercial fiction, particularly crime, thriller and mystery writers.
​
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and an Associate Member of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA).

If you're a new proofreader or editor, having a global mindset in regard to choosing reference resources is essential for maximizing editorial business opportunities.

Like many of my fellow editorial business owners, I’m often approached by potential new entrants to the field who want advice about getting started. One of the most oft-asked questions ​is: ‘Which reference resources – style guides, dictionaries and the like – do I need?'

Bear in mind that anyone you seek guidance from in regard to best-fit resources must respect the fact that you might not be from the same place as them, speak like them, have the same potential clients as them, and spell colour/color like they do, or as a client brief asks them to.
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Centrism, whether from the United Kingdom, the United States, or elsewhere in the world, is useless to you as a new entrant because it’s based on false assumptions about you and your potential clients.

Social science ‘styles’ from an international perspective
Here’s a wee case fictive case study. Imagine a new entrant to the editing profession tells me the following:

They're from California.

They have a degree in public administration.

They have work experience in the field of policy research and implementation for a public-services organization.

They're prepared to use their educational qualifications and work experience as an editing specialism.

Based on this, I suggest that social science publishers and academics would be good initial target markets.

Does my new starter’s location affect their choice of potential publishers clients? It’s not clear cut.

The online world has knocked down those geographical boundaries; you don’t have to spend a fortune to send page proofs to someone hundreds of miles away; you can email them to someone thousands of miles away for the price of an Internet connection.

And how does my new starter’s location in the United States more broadly affect what they need to learn in terms of styles and language preferences? Again, it’s not clear cut.

I see The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) recommended as the sole must-have resource so often in online discussions about editorial work that I worry that new entrants may fall into the trap of thinking that this ‘bible’ alone will tell them everything they need to know.

Super though it is (I love chunks of it for fiction editing), CMOS is not the be all and end all of style guides, because it depends on what a client wants, the subject matter and country-specific language preferences.

The California-based publisher SAGE Publications asks that its copyeditors have a thorough knowledge of both the CMOS and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA).

But note that these are core requirements for SAGE’s US book division. If you want to freelance for the US journal division, you’ll need to add the AMA Manual of Style and The CSE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers to your reading list. (Bear in mind, too, that not all publishers want us to use the most current version of these manuals.)

But why stop there? If my new starter can get work with SAGE in California, might it not be sensible to tap its sister office in London? But in that case, our newbie will also need familiarity with New Hart’s Rules, The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors, and Butcher’s Copyediting.

Or what if our new starter decides to target social science academics who are based in the US? They'll need to ask:
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Will those academics all be writing books for US publishers?

Will they submit articles only to American journals?

Actually, it’s just as likely that an eminent Boston-based scholar will submit to the European Journal of Political Research as to the American Political Science Review, Scandinavian Political Studies, or the Canadian Journal of Political Science.
This will impact on what our newbie needs to know. For example:
​

Will it be ‘behavior’ or ‘behaviour’?

Will a comma in a sentence come before a closing quotation, or after?

Will ‘decision-making’ lose its hyphen?

‘Organize’ or ‘organise’?

Spaced parenthetical en dashes or closed-up em dashes?

Location doesn’t determine readership
Where our clients live doesn’t determine where they publish or the location of their intended readership.

Given that the editorial freelancing market is competitive, it makes sense to exploit the most obvious opportunities.

In the Internet Age, the physical barriers are gone. The only barrier to exploring an international work stream is an inability to appreciate that language conventions and preferences differ according to client (whether that be a particular publisher, a particular independent author, a particular journal), not according to one, and only one, globally recognized set of rules.

Honestly – such a thing doesn’t exist; it doesn’t even exist within many countries.

Diversity of geography, language, and preferences
It’s not so much about where we live, but where our clients live and what preferences they have.

I live in the UK. I’ve worked with a Swedish fantasy author who wanted to use American terminology but UK spelling with –ize suffixes.

I've copyedited indie fiction for UK-based authors who wanted to use American spelling.

I’ve proofread for academic publishers who asked me for US spelling and ‘style’ for one project, and then, two weeks later, sent a brief for a new project that asked for something completely different.

I’ve proofread law books that used Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities (OSCOLA), sociology books that used Harvard, and industrial relations journals that used Vancouver.

I’ve worked on research-methods books that were styled according to CMOS, linguistics books that asked for APA, and politics reports that used The Economist style guide.

I’ve proofread philosophy books where the style was … let’s just call it ‘go with the flow’.

Many of the publishers I've worked for have a ‘house’ style.

If you're a new entrant to the field and are wondering what you need to know, instead of listening to my preferences, familiarize yourself with a number of appropriate resources depending on what your clients want.

Perhaps it’s CMOS; perhaps it’s not. And even if it is, ONLY knowing this could mean you're seriously restricting the base of clients for whom you can work, the types of material you can work on, and the geographical locations you can explore.

So try the following:

Think about which particular client groups you’re most suited to.

Do some research that will tell you what those clients require.

Use that information to inform the decision about which resources to invest in.

If your world revolves around CMOS, it’s possibly a smaller world than it needs to be. And if your world is smaller than it needs to be, so are the opportunities you're exploring in a market that’s already very competitive.

One other item to note. CMOS, CSE, APA, AMA, and the like are style guides; they give you guidance on whether, for example, to close up or hyphenate a compound adjective. They won't necessarily give you extensive guidance on how a word is being used, and whether that usage is considered standard, and in which community.
​Usage manuals, which give that kind of information, are as important as style guides. Using a style guide or a usage manual alone is an invitation to disaster.

Out with borders and in with flexibility
When you’re the owner of an editorial business you need to learn what your clients want you to learn, whether it’s a manual published by Chicago or Oxford, a house brief designed by a team of publisher project managers, a detailed set of guidelines issued by a European NGO, or a short brief issued by an independent author of fiction.

I encourage you to think broadly, globally, and flexibly. If someone tries to guide to towards only one set of ‘rules’, at best their advice will restrict you; at worst it will be just plain wrong or inappropriate.

There is, alas, no simple answer to the question of which resources are best. Instead, careful thought and planning centred around client- and skill-focused research is a good first step. That way, you’ll learn for yourself what resources, tools, and knowledge bases are suitable for you, your potential market, and your particular business model.
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Language usage, styles, and preferences differ – and that’s okay. Don’t let anyone tell you that’s not the case!

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with independent authors of commercial fiction, particularly crime, thriller and mystery writers.
​
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and an Associate Member of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA).

This article offers guidance on how to self-edit your fiction writing so that accents don’t become the primary story.

Do your characters speak with an accent? All of us speak in ways that are distinctive; we just don’t notice our own accents because they’re ours and we’re used to them.

Oxford Dictionaries defines accent as ‘A distinctive way of pronouncing a language, especially one associated with a particular country, area, or social class.’
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Authors who are inexperienced at writing accented language can be tempted to use phonetic spelling. But writing accents is difficult; so is reading them. Most experienced authors and editors will therefore caution against this approach.
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Furthermore, spelling and pronunciation are two different things. Says Beth Hill in The Magic of Fiction (pp. 409, 394):

‘All English speakers would spell the words in the sentence you’re reading the same way; they just might pronounce them differently. [...] Dialogue is a report of the words that are spoken, not a visual of how they’re spoken. Show the how through means other than odd or phonetic spellings.’

Avoiding the inexperienced-ear trap
My husband was born in Belgium. He speaks fluent French. My friend Alain was born in southern France. He also speaks fluent French. They can hear strong differences in their pronunciation. Alain knows that Johnny’s accent is Belgian though he can’t tell what part of Belgium Johnny was born in. Johnny can tell that Alain is from France, and can even identify that he’s from the south, but not where in the south.

I have enough French to get by, but it’s limited. When I hear Johnny and Alain speaking French to each other, I can’t hear the difference in their accents because my ear isn’t experienced enough.

I also have friends and family from Yorkshire, England. To me, their accents sound the same, but I know they’re not. Nor are the turns of phrase they use. That’s because people in Yorkshire don’t all speak the same, even if those of us with inexperienced ears think they do. And I don’t speak identically to every other person born in Buckinghamshire, or use the same turns of phrase.

And there’s the first problem. The ways accents are rendered by a writer will be influenced by theirexperience of that accent. If their experience is limited, any attempt to mimic it in writing could seem absurd to a reader with a more experienced ear. It could even turn into parody, and a bad one at that.

Consider how much we’re influenced by others. Many of us talk to and listen to voices from all over the world. Speech is elastic and we often borrow from each other – not just words and phrases but pronunciation too. What each of us defines as accented, or not accented, will depend on where we’ve been, who we know, and what we’ve heard.

When phonetic spelling trumps story
Conveying accents through phonetic spelling can lead to phonemes trumping action.
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Here’s a mangled example of a French person speaking English. The spelling is phonetic:

Ze corpse was found in ze woods zis morning. ’Ow did zat ’appen? Ze area was checked only yesterday. Sumsing iz wrong ’ere.

If the protagonist detective is French, and every time she opens her mouth this is what we have to read, our focus won’t be on the plot.

The most important thing about the sentence above is what it tells us: a corpse was found in a section of the woods that had been given the all-clear. Which means either the area wasn’t cordoned off and guarded, or the team didn’t check the area properly.

​That’s not what the reader will be focusing on. Instead they’ll be digging their way through a multitude of zeds. It’s a distraction that pulls the reader out of the story.

Plus, we need to ask whether that phonetic spelling renders the speech authentic. I’d argue it’s a horrible inauthentic caricature that has no place in any work of fiction that isn’t intended to mock.

My friend Alain mastered the th phoneme within a few weeks of living in the UK. Yes, his English was – and still is – accented (just as mine is to others), but if he was my detective, the most realistic way I could render this line in his mouth would be:

The corpse was found in the woods this morning. How did that happen? The area was checked only yesterday. Something is wrong here.

Which is just like I’d say and spell it in English. And so would my Scottish friend Denise, and my Canadian friend Janet, and my American friend Carrie, my German friend Nicole, my Yorkshire-born friend Helen ... you get the picture.

We all have different accents, but conveying them with phonetic spelling is distraction not enrichment.

Deliver what you promised and what’s interestingIf your reader thought they were buying a mystery, a thriller, a romance or sci-fi opera, they might be disappointed to find out they’re reading something else.Lessons in how your Dutch, Indian, Welsh or British protagonist or transgressor pronounces words are not what they paid for.​Furthermore, is your character’s accent really their most interesting trait? That they’re from a particular region or country might be enriching backstory. It might even play into the plot line. But is their accent key to the story? If it’s not – if it’s no more relevant than how they take their coffee – it needn’t go on the page, and if it does, it need only be in passing.

Respect your audience now, then and from wherever​There’s more than one way of speaking English. Just because I speak in a certain way, doesn’t make it standard. It’s just my way of speaking.
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But there’s a bigger problem. Seeking to render pronunciation ‘authentically’ can reinforce discrimination:

‘A stereotypical rendering of regional accent or dialect based on racial, cultural or ethnic "difference" could cause offence. Accent and dialogue in fiction may perpetuate harmful stereotypes. The simple-talking so-called "native" features strongly, for example, in fiction of past eras that either consciously supported or failed to question supremacist projects of conquest and domination.’ (Now Novel)

Writers need to examine their own biases (however unintentional) when they convey accents, and other characters’ perceptions of them. Plus, at the very least, overworked or badly done written accents can sound like mockery. And even if you think your writing is amusing, your reader might not.

Years ago, I worked on a book in which the protagonist – for whom we were rooting – mocked his German arch-enemy for his ‘ridiculous’ pronunciation of a w as a v when speaking English. Actually, it was the protagonist and the author who ended up looking ridiculous because there is no ‘correct’ way to pronounce a w that can be universally applied across the planet.

If one character’s mockery of another’s accent is central to the plot, that might be an opportunity to introduce phonetically spelled written accents briefly, but it will be a device that shows the mocker as ignorant and closed-minded. If that’s not your intention, and it doesn’t drive the novel forward, don’t include it.

Make things easy for your reader
The best novels make us forget we’re reading them. We’re so immersed in the story that we don’t notice we’re processing words on a page.

Every time a writer forces us to decipher how a word sounds, they risk dragging us out of their book. If a book is littered with accented narrative and dialogue, we might not even get to the immersion stage.

Say Mittelmark and Newman (p. 151):

‘No matter how good an ear you have, and how perfectly you’ve captured it, it soon becomes a task to read. The reader is forced to sound out each word, like somebody studying ESL, and will soon grow impatient. Instead, one or two well-placed words sprinkled throughout are enough to flavour the whole thing.’

‘Ah, but what about Irvine Welsh?’ you might say. This review on Goodreads reflects my own experience of Trainspotting:

‘I must have read the first page of Trainspotting more than twenty times since purchasing the book years ago, and each time I would put it back in fear of all the Scottish dialect. There's no point lying, this is a challenging novel. Sometimes you have to read things twice or pause to think about them to fully understand what’s being said. But, unlike a lot of books that are difficult to read, this was ultimately rewarding and once you get used to the slang words it becomes a very gritty, moving and funny read.'

Yes, he’s a great writer and it’s a great book, but I found it hard work. And I’m not always in the mood for hard work. I read for relaxation.

If you think your audience is like me and this reviewer, think twice about whether you want to go down this route.
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Plus, it’s unlikely that any writer will be able to pull off what Welsh does if they’re writing accents and dialect that aren’t their own.

Other ways to convey accent – light flavouring

‘When doing any kind of accent, whether regional dialect, foreign accent, or a characteristic like a lisp, it is important to remember that a little goes a long way.’ (Mittelmark and Newman, p. 151)

So how might we gently nudge the reader to imagine a character’s accent in a way that avoids literally spelling it out? Here are 6 ideas:

1. Snippets of another languageIf the character’s from another country, you could add in a few of their native-language words here and there.

​Agatha Christie peppered her Poirot novels with mais ouis and monamis (and Sophie Hannah has followed that style in her Poirot continuation mysteries). Christie didn’t go over the top though, and nor does Hannah. In ClosedCasket, Poirot speaks at length, sometimes over several pages, and there’s no hint of a non. Less really is more.

You could also introduce words from the character’s original language in moments of stress. Bear in mind, though, that lots of swear words (e.g. fuck) have an international appeal, so even a non-native English speaker might prefer this over their own language.

I confess to being a little bemused when I read Poirot’s French snippets. He speaks English fluently, as this short excerpt from The ABC Murders (p. 3) demonstrates:

‘C’est vrai. To grow the vegetable marrows. And immediately a murder occurs—and I send the vegetable marrows to promenade themselves to the devil [...]'

​The French therefore seems a little out of place. Poirot is able to use metaphor artfully, yet reverts to his native language for a simpler phrase. To some readers it will look a little contrived and old-fashioned.
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Still, it’s Christie, and she published this book in 1936. Fair enough. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right for your contemporary novel.

2. Noticing another’s accent
Another character might notice someone’s accent – perhaps a Brit enters the scene in a novel set in the US, and the American protagonist notices the way they pronounce a hard t.

In this case, it’s an observation that tells us something about the Brit’s voice, and from then on the reader can imagine their idea of how that would sound. No more need be said about it. This approach is best done early on.

A character might frame another’s accent in terms of thoughts about how they themselves struggle to roll an r with the ease that the Parisian they’re listening to does.

Or your character might convey another’s country of origin by pointing out how excellent their English is and how, for example, their Swedish or Russian accent is barely discernible.
​3. Idiom and localization
Localized or idiomatic words and phrases can also provide triggers for a reader that help them imagine accent. So perhaps your visiting Mancunian momentarily throws the people they’re hanging out with in Baltimore when they use the terms pissed or pants.

And a character could identify another’s accent in the narrative by way of appreciating it. Again, it gives readers just enough information to do their own imagining.

Check with people in the know if you use this approach. Say Mittelmark and Newman (p. 107):

‘When you use idioms incorrectly, it makes you sound as if you come for a different culture than the reader, and possibly a different planet.’

However, this warning might be something you can use purposefully if it’s suitable for your plot.

4. Contractions and dropped consonants
You could sprinkle the dialogue with just a few dropped consonants or contractions to convey accent (’appen, innit, ain’t, nowt, t’other). Again, less is more. It shouldn’t stand out more than the story.

5. Grammatical structures that trip in translation
Learn about other regional and grammatical structures that you could introduce once in a while. Says Now Novel:

‘Take the example of Russian immigrants to English-speaking countries. In the Russian language, there are few auxiliary verbs (verbs such as the verb “to be” or “is” are inferred from context). Thus errors such as “he good man” (for “he is a good man”) or “you go work tomorrow?” occur.’

Still, take care not to overdo these to the point of caricature and cliché.

​6. Stories from other places
Bring in other details that characterize a person’s place of birth – a detail about the environment, culture or food preferences, for example.

Some years ago I was in Oslo in winter. I was cold and commented on the woeful weather to my friend. He replied: ‘Here in Norway, we say there’s no such thing as bad weather, just inappropriate clothing.’

Another half-Norwegian friend (I know quite a few Norwegians!) once told me about one of her favourite childhood snacks, Svolvær postei (it's a kind of fish paste). We scoffed our way through several tins of the stuff one delicious afternoon. That, not her pronunciation, is what sticks in my mind when I think of her Norwegianness.

For the novelist, those kinds of small details might be a more enriching way of conveying a person’s heritage than butchering the spelling of their dialogue.

Why focus on that accent?One final thing to consider is why you would focus on one character’s accent and not every other’s. Remember, everyone speaks with an accent, whether our own ears recognize it as such or not.

So imagine you’re an American living in the US. You’re in a cafe. Most of the people around you are from the US and pronounce words the way Americans do – which is to say, differently but broadly with an American accent. You don’t notice this because these accents are familiar to you.

Then four Brits join your table and begin to speak. You notice their accents because they stand out for you. However, the four Brits think their accents are uninteresting because they’re familiar with their own pronunciation. Your American accent is the one that stands out.

Now imagine that cafe is your novel and the people are your readers. What’s interesting – what stands out – depends on who’s doing the listening.

The contemporary reader watches movies and TV, and listens to radio and podcasts. All of us are exposed to multiple voices and accents. We're used to noticing them, absorbing them and moving on.

When I’m reading Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels, which are set in Scotland, I’m not given frequent reminders that the primary characters speak with Scottish accents. When I’m reading Harlen Coben’s Myron Bolitar novels, which are set in the US, I’m not told that the characters speak with American accents. Why would the authors made a big deal of a Belgian, Indian, Swedish or British accent but not a Scottish or American accent?

That’s not to say it wouldn’t be interesting to know where those people come from if that’s relevant to the story, and it might serve to ground the viewpoint character’s perceptions of their own nationality and pronunciation, but it wouldn’t excuse phonetic renditions of people talking differently.

Consider, therefore, whether it’s necessary to make an issue of one of your character’s accents just because their pronunciation stands out to your ear when you’ve been happy to ignore the ‘home’-accented voices in your book. Any mention should be purposeful.​Summing upIt isn’t necessary to write accents. There are other more interesting ways to show where someone’s from.

Focus on the story you’re telling and how you’re going to move it forward rather than worrying how the speakers pronounce their vowels and consonants. If you give the reader a little background and a light peppering, they can do all the imagining for themselves.

If you still feel compelled to convey accents in your fiction, do so purposefully and sparingly, especially if they’re accents that you’re not familiar with. And watch out for caricature, parody and bias.

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with independent authors of commercial fiction, particularly crime, thriller and mystery writers.
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She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and an Associate Member of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA).

Here are 5 things you can do in the year ahead to put a shine on the way you run your editing and proofreading business,

1. Be the editor who says, ‘It’s down to me’
Editors who work in-house edit. As for the other stuff, someone else does that for them – marketing, accounting, branding, heating the building, providing a good-quality office chair ... all of it.

All of those things are down to us. If we don’t make them part of our job, we risk not being able to put food on the table, not paying our bills, breaching our legal responsibilities, working in an environment that’s physically unfit for purpose and, worst of all, having no clients. And we have to buy our own chairs.

Chairs aside, having no clients means we’re not independent business owners. It means we’re unemployed.

There are bits of my job I’d rather not do. You’re probably the same. I happen to love the marketing side of things but I have friends who loathe it. One of my editor pals gets a kick from using gadgets and spreadsheets that help her manage her invoicing; I find it a bore. That’s fine – we’re different. However, we both must find clients and track our financials, whether we struggle with these tasks or relish the challenge.

Being an editor is not enough. Being an editor is the work we do. Everything else is the work we do to get the work we do and operate in a professional manner.
​
Editing is only one part of being an editorial business owner. For our businesses to thrive, we must do all the parts. We can’t afford to say, ‘But I don’t like marketing’, ‘I’m not good with spreadsheets’, ‘I’m not interested in the business end of things’, or ‘I don’t have time to learn how to do those things’, because we’re not employees.

​We have to say, ‘It’s down to me.’

2. Make changes
No one gets it perfect right from the get-go. Running a business is about testing and tracking so that we discover what works and what doesn’t. If things aren’t going as we hoped, we need to be ready to invest in change.

If our schedules have lots of gaps in them, our marketing needs work.

If we’re not attracting the clients we want to work with, our branding needs attention.

If we’re not earning enough to make ends meet, we need to find new clients or tweak our fee structure.

If we’re attracting clients who let us down, we need to tweak our contracts and terms.

If our scheduling is muddled, our time management needs fixing.

​Easy to say, harder to do, I know. But change we must. The responsibility lies with us.

EXAMPLEAll businesses change. For example, a publisher might outsource production to another country, squeeze more words on a page, ask freelancers to do more for the same money, or freeze its project fees, all of which have an impact on profitability for the independent editor working for that publisher.

The editor could say that the negative impact on the health of their business is the publisher’s fault, that it's not fair, that it's exploitative. But blaming publishers for taking action to make themselves profitable is not a solution.

‘And it will reduce the quality,’ some editors say. Maybe not, maybe so. That’s not our problem. It’s theirs. They’re business owners and so are we. All of us do what we need to do to make our enterprises successful.If we don’t like the way a client's operating, we should take positive action to find a replacement. It's not the client's job to make another business owner's enterprise successful.

​It can be tempting to use online spaces – Facebook groups, for example – to vent our complaints. However, that’s a waste of precious time that we could be using to locate our new client.

​Action for change trumps blame every time.

3. Don't measure your own success against other people’s raw data
Track your own data and use it to assess the health of your editing business. Your colleagues’ metrics don’t matter because those relate to their businesses, not yours.

And there’s another problem – it’s often like comparing apples and oranges. Here are two examples:

The data picked up by Google Analytics varies from website host to host. That means any comparison of my Weebly site with a colleague’s Wordpress or Wix site is pretty much meaningless.

Even when you look at your own data, you’ll get different figures depending on the analytics program you’re using. I access analytics data using StatCounter, Google Analytics and Weebly. None of the numbers are the same, and I don't mean a little bit not the same; I mean a lot not the same. It’s not that two of those programs are wrong but that all three are recording different things.

Does that mean you shouldn’t look at analytics? Not at all. But instead of looking at just the raw numbers, think about longer-term patterns in the data and outcomes (bookings/sales).

​How does this financial quarter compare with the previous one, or this year with the previous one? Have you made changes either on your website or elsewhere that might have influenced your analytics?

​PATTERN EXAMPLES

WHAT ARE THE LONGER-TERM BUSINESS OUTCOMES?

Your analytics program tells you the page views on your site have risen from 5,000 per year 2 years ago to 80,000 in the current year. The data reveals that this is down to your blogging.

​The more important question is whether there’s a correlation between your blog-driven traffic and the number of requests to quote from clients who are offering the kind of work you want to do and are prepared to pay your price.

That you've increased your traffic to 80,000 in 2 years is irrelevant if you're still not attracting enough paying work from ideal clients.

If a blog is generating traffic but that isn't converting into sales, assess whether your content's hitting the mark. In other words, are you solving the right problems?

You regularly post on LinkedIn. You’ve built a large number of connections and get strong engagement with your posts. Your analytics data tells you that LI has driven more traffic to your site than any other social media platform in the past 12 months.

The more important question is whether you can discern a corresponding increase in work leads and sales (even indirectly) and other opportunities that drive your business forward.

Social media platforms are fantastic content distribution and networking platforms. Still, when it comes to business, we need to use them with purposeful goals in mind.

You’ve noticed a 20% decrease in views of your contact page in the past three months. You’ve made some big changes to your website this quarter as part of a branding exercise and worry they’ve had a negative effect.

The important question to ask is how that corresponds with the number of people asking for quotes, and the number of confirmed bookings.

Visiting a contact page and getting in contact are two completely different things. If you’re still receiving the same number of requests to quote as in the previous quarter, perhaps you’re appealing to a more targeted client base and are achieving a higher visit:click conversion ratio.

Even if you’re receiving fewer requests to quote, but more of those have turned into confirmed bookings, that’s a positive outcome, and one to be celebrated, not a negative one! It shows that your branding is working.

To be meaningful, they need to be considered over time and evaluated within the context of, and measured against, business goals: e.g. requests to quote, confirmed bookings, quality of clients, income, and the length of your wait-list. Otherwise, they’re nothing more than vanity metrics.

As for other people’s raw stats, they tell you nothing about your own business’s needs and goals. Don't spend valuable time worrying about them.

4. Track, plan and schedule
Like all sole traders, independent editors have to do everything themselves, unless they contract out services to, say, a VA, a marketer or an accountant, any of which will incur costs.

We can find ourselves being asked to carry out impossible feats of juggling – too many activities and not enough time to do what must be done. The solution could lie in improved scheduling:
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​(1) Track how much time you spend on social mediaduring work hours and check that all of it isrelevant to your business. Be strict with your social engagement – schedule it, and stick to that plan. You’ll save time and be more productive.

EXAMPLES

The hive mind is wonderful but there is such a thing as too many cooks in the kitchen. If you’re stuck on an editing conundrum, might you query with the client and move on rather than spending half an hour on Facebook garnering opinion from several hundred editors?

If a job is struggling to hold your attention, could you switch away and do something else for your business such as marketing or invoicing rather than letting off steam on Twitter?

If you don’t have enough work, how about doing things to find work rather than telling 10,000 colleagues online that you’re having a rough time? Sympathy is not a solution, lovely though it is.

(2) Schedule all tasks, not just editing. Invoicing, marketing, replying to requests to quote, and dealing with queries can cause problems when they’re not scheduled. If you have 7 hours a day available for work, allot some of that time to stuff that enables you to run your business.

​That might mean you only have 5 hours a day available for editing, not 7, which means you’ll need to assign a longer period of time to complete each project. If you need to shift things around, fine – there’s a big difference between drinking your tea at a different time and forgetting to switch the kettle on.

EXAMPLE
When Denise Cowle and I decided to set up The Editing Podcast, we knew the pre-launch work would have to be squeezed into our already busy business and personal schedules. This was a new venture, one that would run on top of our existing business activities, not instead of them.

​It would have been easy for either of us to say, ‘I don’t have time – let’s do it in the next couple of weeks. I’ll call you when I’m free.’ We knew this would be a disaster, that it would lead to procrastination and delay.

Instead, we scheduled our planning, content-creation and recording sessions months in advance. Work and family commitments intruded, of course, but changes were accommodated with immediate rescheduling. We stayed on track by keeping the kettle on!

5. Create templates and information resourcesTemplates make life easier and help editors work faster. They can be customized, of course, but the underlying framework is in place, meaning we can focus on tweaking the nitty-gritty so that what we’re creating is specific to the recipient. The following all lend themselves to templating:

Style sheets

Editorial reports

Replies to requests for information

Invoices

When we find ourselves explaining the same problem to different clients, it’s time to create a resource that we can use indefinitely.

For example, if you’re a developmental editor you might have written numerous reports and queries in which you describe the fundamentals of narrative point of view. Instead of repeating yourself, create a document that outlines the principles in detail.

The initial work will take you time, but once done you can use it over and over.
You can also place that information on your website and use it as a promotional tool.

EXAMPLE
I’m a specialist sentence-level fiction editor. Many of my clients are first-time authors who struggle to punctuate dialogue, use apostrophes correctly, and render thoughts consistently in their writing.

When I’m creating the handover editorial report, I don’t include long explanations about why and how I fixed these problems. Instead, I alert clients to the issues in brief and link to the relevant booklets on my website.

I’ve shaved hours off my report-writing time and repurposed the resources for business promotion.

Summing up
If you’re looking for ways to make your business life run more smoothly in the next 12 months, perhaps some or all of these 5 tips will help you to save time, increase productivity, and take action.

There are some free templates and other resources in the Further Reading section below. Help yourself.

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with independent authors of commercial fiction, particularly crime, thriller and mystery writers.
​
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and an Associate Member of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA).

Thought, imagined dialogue, and other internal discourse (also called interior discourse) may be enclosed in quotation marks or not, according to the context or the writer’s preference. [...]
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“I don’t care if we have offended Morgenstern,” thought Vera. “Besides,” she told herself, “they’re all fools.”

This is undoubtedly my least-favourite option. ​I recommend you use the speech-mark style with caution. I can’t remember the last time I saw this approach used in commercial fiction coming out of a mainstream publisher’s stable. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been, of course!

I dislike it intensely, and many fiction publishers seem to be choosing other methods by preference, but those aren’t good reasons to avoid it. Your style is your choice. The best reason for avoiding it is that using speech marks could confuse your reader.

The beauty of speech marks – or quotation marks – is that they indicate speech. When you put speech marks around a character’s thoughts, your reader will immediately assume they’re reading the spoken word.

Look at the CMOS example above. Only when we hit thought Vera do we realize she’s not speaking at all. She’s thinking.

Some authors might be tempted to use a different speech-mark style to indicate a thought. Again, this is confusing. Your reader might assume that you’ve not edited for consistency, as this example demonstrates:

“Jen, drop the knife. You’ll do yourself an injury.”“No way. I’m not safe here, and nor are you.”Jen held the blade steady and looked around.‘Crap. I need an exit,’ she thought.

If, like me, you want something a little cleaner, something that won’t pull your reader out of the story because you led them down a speech-based garden path only to pull them up short at the gate, here are a few alternatives.

Method 2: Italic text
You can render your thoughts in italic text. For short thought streams, this is a common approach.

Let’s return to the CMOS example and see what it looks like:

I don’t care if we have offended Morgenstern, thought Vera. Besides, she told herself, they’re all fools.

The advantages of this style are as follows:

It’s a standard approach that readers will be familiar with.

There’s no confusion. It’s clear that Vera’s not speaking out loud because the speech marks have been omitted.

However, some readers find that large chunks of italic strain their eyes. I’m one of them. I’m much more likely to skim over huge passages of italic because it’s not a pleasant reading experience.

If that text is masking a clue, or a key character trait, information about an important event or something else that holds the plot together, it’s essential that the reader accesses it.

Look at the Vera example again. There are two thought tags – thought Vera and she told herself – just to ram the point home that she’s thinking. Some readers and writers might consider two tags overkill, but they do help to break up the italic text and don’t jar as much as they might.

But imagine if Vera’s thought stream had gone something like this:

I don’t care if we have offended Morgenstern, thought Vera. Besides, she told herself, they’re all fools. Those people at the bank, they don’t care a hoot for anyone but themselves. Like it’s their money they’re investing. We’ve trusted that bloody bank with our savings and look at what it’s got us. Nothing. Damn cheek. Vera put the letter back in the envelope and scowled.

That’s a lot of italic to get one’s retinas around. If you have a long stream of consciousness, you might prefer another method.

Method 3: Normal body text
This style forgoes speech marks and italic, and sticks to normal text. This is how it looks with the longer Vera example:

I don’t care if we have offended Morgenstern, thought Vera. Besides, she told herself, they’re all fools. Those people at the bank, they don’t care a hoot for anyone but themselves. Like it’s their money they’re investing. We’ve trusted that bloody bank with our savings and look at what it’s got us. Nothing. Damn cheek. Vera put the letter back in the envelope and scowled.

The advantage of this style is that it’s easy on the eye. However, some readers might be jarred by changes in tense.

If your narrative is set in the past tense and set in the third person (as in this example with Vera) and you use the same text style for present-tense direct thoughts, then in a longer thought stream you could pull your reader out of the story.

And if this happens frequently, your prose will be riddled with flip-flopping tenses that are at best frustrating and at worst confusing.

Method 4: Free indirect styleAnother option is to use free indirect style (sometimes called free indirect discourse or free indirect speech). This style offers the essence of first-person thought but through a third-person viewpoint.

The advantages of this style are as follows:

The character’s voice is foremost but gone is the clutter of speech marks, speech tags, and italic.

The thoughts can be formatted in the normal body-text style but without the risk of jarring the reader because the tense will be consistent with the main narrative.

The shift away from the thought stream and into the usual third-person narrative is seamless.

Let’s return to Vera to see how this works:

Vera didn’t care if they’d offended Morgenstern. Besides, they were all fools. Those people at the bank, they didn’t care a hoot for anyone but themselves. Like it was their money they were investing. Her family had trusted that bloody bank with their savings and look at what it had got them. Nothing. Damn cheek. Vera put the letter back in the envelope and scowled.

The free indirect style does keep the narrative distance close but it’s still not quite as immediate at the present-tense first person. So is there anything else we can do?

Method 5: Mix it up
A more creative option might be to combine direct and indirect thought styles.

In the example below we begin with two sentences that use the italic style for the present-tense first-person thought, and we retain the thought tags to break up the text.

Then we move into roman text but cast the thought stream in the free indirect style, which matches the main narrative: third-person past tense.

I don’t care if we have offended Morgenstern, thought Vera. Besides, she told herself, they’re all fools. Those people at the bank, they didn’t care a hoot for anyone but themselves. Like it was their money they were investing. Her family had trusted that bloody bank with their savings and look at what it had got them. Nothing. Damn cheek. Vera put the letter back in the envelope and scowled.

The advantages of this style are as follows:
​

It’s flexible. The character’s voice is foremost throughout. The narrative distance shifts from the immediacy of the present-tense first person but is still close – we’re still in Vera’s head even when we’re in the third person.

The italic doesn’t dominate, so the text is easy on the reader’s eye.

Given that the thought stream is quite long, it still doesn’t feel invasive. The shift into free indirect style gives us a breather. This approach might therefore suit you if your character is having an inner rant and the inner turmoil feels overworked.

We’ve retained the seamless shift back to the main third-person past-tense narrative comfortably.

Summing up
As with many sentence-level decisions in fiction writing, rendering thoughts is about style choices rather than a single prescriptive rule. Choose the solution that fits your story best. This might mean making different decisions at various points in your novel depending on what’s going on.

Consider combining approaches if you have longer thought streams and want to be sure of retaining reader engagement.

And, finally, avoid speech marks when it comes thoughts. They’re called speech marks for a reason and are best reserved for talking and muttering!

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with independent authors of commercial fiction, particularly crime, thriller and mystery writers.
​
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and an Associate Member of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA).

Repetition of key words and phrases in narrative and dialogue can make the reading experience laborious. There are times, however, when saying something more than once works beautifully. It’s time to talk about anaphora.

What is anaphora?Anaphora is the deliberate repetition of words or phrases at the beginning of successive clauses for artistic effect. This literary device is often seen in poetic works and in speeches. It’s also common to see it in children’s books that have a rhyming element.

Anaphora – rhythm, emphasis and emotional back doors
First, repetition of words affects rhythm, which can evoke mood: monotony, boredom, excitement, frustration. Emotions transform a story from just words on a page to a reader experience. Plus, rhythmic writing is memorable and digestible, which helps your reader get under the skin of your novel.

Second, anaphora can be used for the purpose of emphasis. We notice repetition and, while it can jar when not used purposefully, deliberate repetition helps your character or narrator to drive a point home.
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Third, anaphora is one of a range of tools that will help you keep your writing tight but emotionally rich. Repetition is used purposefully so that the reader understands what the character is feeling, but via a literary back door.

Anaphora and your fiction’s narrative
Reading isn’t just about ingesting words. It’s about experiencing a sense of place and mood. There are different ways in which a writer can help a reader engage with a character and their story.
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​1. You can tell them what a character’s feeling:

TELLING
​Melanie felt angry and bored. She’d been sitting in the jobcentre for forty-five minutes, had watched the same old faces passing back and forth, but as usual her name hadn’t been called.

​2. You can show them what’s being felt with action beats:

ACTION BEATSMelanie scowled and tapped her fingers on the arm of the chair. The same old faces had passed back and forth but forty-five minutes had passed and no one had called her name.

3. You can nudge them by playing with the rhythmic structures, of which anaphora is one:

ANAPHORA​Forty-five minutes had passed. Melanie waited but no one had called her name. Same old faces, same old silence, same old story.

None is wrong or right but relying on only one could render your prose dull. Experimenting with different techniques can enrich your narrative.

Anaphora and your fiction’s dialogueWe often use anaphoric constructions in everyday speech, and the fiction writer seeking to mimic that naturally shouldn’t fear using them in dialogue. Here are some examples:

EXAMPLES

‘Every time you mention his name, every time you pick up that photograph, every time you recall some place you visited together, you’re telling me I’m second choice.’

‘See that heap of corpses in there? That’s why I do this job. That’s why I come home late. That’s why I forget birthdays and anniversaries. Those people’s lives were stolen from them and it’s my job to get justice for them,’ said Grimes.

‘You think it’ll be easy. You think it won’t get any worse. You think you’ll be able to put it behind you. And you’re wrong.’

Marty shook his head. ‘This is not your crusade. It never was. It’s mine. My voice, my life, my fight. Butt out and let me get on with it.’

​Note how the repetition adds emphasis and heightens the emotion.
​
Take example (1). The anaphora helps us to feel the character’s frustration and hurt. We don’t need an action beat or dialogue tag to tell us this. There’s no need for the narrator to interject with an explanation. We don’t even need to use italic to nudge the reader towards where the emphasis should be placed in our mind’s ear. The anaphoric speech does it all for us.

Here are examples of how the passage might look with extraneous information:

REDUNDANT ADVERBIAL DIALOGUE TAG ‘Every time you mention his name, every time you pick up that photograph, every time you recall some place you visited together, you’re telling me I’m second choice,’ said Ash, frustrated.

REDUNDANT NARRATIONAsh felt frustrated and hurt. ‘Every time you mention his name, every time you pick up that photograph, every time you recall some place you visited together, you’re telling me I’m second choice.’

REDUNDANT ITALIC EMPHASIS‘Every time you mention his name, every time you pick up that photograph, every time you recall some place you visited together, you’re telling me I’m second choice.’

Used purposefully, anaphora can help writers declutter their dialogue. Readers don’t just focus on the words in the conversation: they also do their own emotional imagining. That can be a more rewarding way of engaging with the story than being told what the character must be feeling.

Anaphora, memorability and overuseAnaphoric constructions are rhythmic, which makes them memorable. That’s why politicians employ them in their speeches when they’re trying to rally the masses, and why children’s book authors use them to help young readers engage with their stories.
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Look how Julia Donaldson uses it to gorgeous effect in The Magic Paintbrush:

“Go and catch some shrimps, Shen.Go and catch some fish.Go and gather oysters
To fill the empty dish.”
[...]She draws a flower, a flying fish,She draws a boat at sea.
A hen, a hare, a dancing dog,
A weeping willow tree.

Copyright Julia Donaldson. Macmillan Children's Books, 2017

Still, in a novel, that memorability can work against the writer. If you overuse deliberate repetition, it could become an irritant instead of an engagement device. Readers will view it as a writing pattern, not a writing tool.

As with any literary device, think about peppering rather than littering your prose with anaphora. That way, you maximize the impact. It becomes just one literary device among others that makes your prose interesting.
​
When repetition isn’t a literary device
Sometimes an author can get so carried away with writing that they don’t notice they’ve repeated words. This can make the prose clunky to read. After your first draft, revisit what you’ve written. You might even like to read it out loud or play it through an onboard narration tool on your computer.
​
Anaphora is deliberate repetition. It serves a purpose – to evoke emotion, drive emphasis, or nudge readers towards their own emotional imagining. If multiple uses of a word or phrase aren’t serving artistry, recast the sentence.

ACCIDENTAL REPETITION
Jim sat in the big black leatheroffice chair behind a large walnut-veneered office desk of the director’s office at PharmaCo HQ. It was his second home.

POSSIBLE RECAST
Jim sat in a large black leather chair behind a walnut-veneered desk. This was PharmaCo’s managing director’s office and Jim’s second home.

ANAPHORA
Jim sat at the desk in his office … the office that had been his second home for three years. The office where he’d sacked half the PharmaCo workforce just to keep the company afloat. The office that held enough sordid secrets to bury anyone who stood in his way.

​Summing up
Anaphora is one device among several that has a place in the novelist’s toolbox. I’m not advocating removing description or action beats – not at all. Rather, I’m suggesting you might like to experiment with anaphora here and there in your fiction.
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If you enjoyed this post, check out my other articles on sentence-level mastery.

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with independent authors of commercial fiction, particularly crime, thriller and mystery writers.
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She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and an Associate Member of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA).

If you’re struggling to decide what to call your new editing or proofreading business, here’s a 6-step framework to set you on the right path.

Deciding what to call your editing or proofreading business is part of the BRANDING process and needs careful consideration. Follow these steps to work out what’s right for you.

Step 1: Brainstorm a list of possible business names
Let your imagination fly. Put your silly hat on. Then your serious one. Then your smarty-pants one. Anything goes at this point. This is all about you and what floats your boat. There’s no wrong or right – just ideas.

For demonstration, let’s imagine a new proofreader called Basil Rhoueny. Basil is trying to decide on a business name and comes up with the following ideas:

Step 2: Identify target clients
The next step is for Basil to identify his target clients. If he doesn’t know who he wants to work for, he can’t create a message that compels them – via his business name, his mission statement, his elevator pitch, his web copy, or any other marketing materials.

And if he doesn’t have a compelling message, why would anyone choose him over any one of the tens of thousands of colleagues who are also offer editing services? ‘I’ll edit and proofread anything for anyone’ isn’t a standout proposition. Basil needs to do better.

Even if an editor is prepared to be something of a generalist, I recommend talking like a specialist when communicating with different client groups. On our websites, that means giving visitors signals so that they can navigate to specialist messaging on different pages that focus on solving group-specific problems.
​
Some people know who they want to work for right from the get-go. Some have no clue. Some think they do, but seven years ahead find that they’ve completely shifted their client base. We’ll deal with that issue in Step 6.

For now, let’s imagine that Basil thinks his editorial training, educational background and former career make him best suited to the following client groups:

academic publishers

students

independent academics

Identifying these groups will help him with Steps 3 and 4.

Step 3: Identify core brand values
A brand can be loosely defined as what others think about us – external perceptions. A brand identity is the distinctive business persona we present that nudges target clients to notice the things that we want them to notice. It’s what allows us to influence those external perceptions.

Brand values are the essence of our brand identity. They represent the kind of editorial pro we want to be seen as – the things we stand for, what we’re passionate about, what makes us tick, why we’re different.

Our business name, photographs, colour palette, web copy and marketing materials should reflect our brand values so that the clients we’d most love to work with will most love to work with us.

It’s no small thing to develop a brand identity. If you need help, I have an online course called Branding for Business Growth that can help you develop an emotion-based business brand identity.

Let’s imagine that Basil has identified the following brand values that he wishes to convey at every touchpoint of his business:

The Editorial Professor – this reflects his desire to proofread knowledgeably and respectfully

The Green Editor – this reflects his commitment to environmental sustainability and socially responsible, ethical business practice

TheGlobalist – this reflects his passion for working with people whose first language isn’t English

Identifying these brand values will help him with Step 5.

Step 4: Serving the client
In this step, Basil revisits his list of business-name ideas and considers whether they’re appropriate for his target client groups: academic publishers, students and independent academics.

Do the business names tell the target client what he’s offering? If people find him online, they’ll likely be deciding in seconds whether he can solve their problems, and therefore whether he’s worth investigating further.

Is the name available? If existing services exist, clients might become confused about who’s who. Basil’s competitors will be less confused than furious that this newbie is diluting their carefully developed brand identity.

Will the name be findable by clients who are searching online for someone who can solve their problems?

Names (1) , (2) and (8) best reflect exactly what he’s offering.

Names (3), (5) and (6) are next in line, though they’re less specific.

Name (4) alludes to sentence-level editing work, and some will think it amusing.
However, Basil wonders whether some of his non-native English-speaking clients will get the joke and bypass him.

Name (5) is a problem – there’s an existing established business called Full Proof | Professional Proofreading Solutions.

Names (4) and (7) give him cause for concern regarding their searchability. It’s likely that the words ‘proofreading’ or ‘editing’ or ‘editorial’ will be searched for by potential clients. It’s far less likely that someone will search for ‘comma sutra’ or ‘perfect prose’ if they need proofreading assistance, though they are distinctive.

Name (6), however, might be great for being found in the search engines by local clients.

Basil decides to remove Comma Sutra, Full-proof Editorial Services, and Perfect Prose from the list of contenders.
​
Now he turns to the branding issue.

Step 5: Serving the brand
In this step, Basil revisits his list of business-name ideas and considers whether they’re good brand practice. His remaining names are:

Are the remaining business names distinctive? After all, branding is about showing potential clients those things that set us apart from other editors, not what will make us look like every other editor.

Do they reflect his brand values (BVs): Editorial Professor, Green Editor, and Globalist?

Basil has an unusual name. If he’d been called John Smith, he might have been easy to confuse with other editors called John Smith, at least in the West. However, either of his remaining business names would work.

There is, however, a good chance that his name might be misspelled. Is this something he needs to worry about if people are searching for him by name? This could be an issue if he’s referring someone to his website by phone, or if a word-of-mouth lead is trying to find him.

Here’s a test. Type ‘louise harby editor’ or ‘louis hornby proofreader’ into the search engines. Can you find me? I can find me! I’m not convinced that tricky-to-spell names are as problematic as we might think.

Back to Basil. Name (3) is at odds with the sentiment of BV-Green Editor. This brand value seeks to nudge potential clients towards thinking of Basil as compassionate, respectful, broad-minded, ethical, warm … someone who can see the bigger picture. The word ‘bullet’ might bring to mind thoughts of violence, death, harm and brutality.
It’s potentially a negative nudge rather than one that evokes positivity.

Name (6), while potentially clickbaity for local searches, doesn’t sit so well with BV-Globalist. Basil would be happy to work with local clients, but he’s not sure he can build a sustainable business on this alone.

Name (8) has a definite though subtle nod to BV-Green Editor.
​
He elects to remove Bulletproof Editorial and Norfolk Editorial from the list of contenders.

Step 6: Think ahead but don’t get bogged down
Can any of us be absolutely sure that what we want to do now is what we will want to do in the years ahead? Choosing a business name requires us to think ahead, but also to be true to who we are and what we’re offering in the present time.

In case you didn’t spot it, Basil’s name is an anagram of mine. When I set up my business in 2005, I was a dedicated proofreader who specialized in working for social-science publishers. If you’d told me back then that by 2016 I’d be specializing in line- and copyediting for indie fiction authors, I’d have been a tad surprised.

But that’s exactly what happened. My original business name was Louise Harnby | Proofreader. My URL was and still is: www.louiseharnbyproofreader.com. My business name now is Louise Harnby | Proofreader & Copyeditor.

It wasn’t actually a big deal to add an ampersand and the word ‘copyeditor’ into my business name and didn’t affect my findability in the search engines. Would it have if I’d changed it to Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor, or Fabulous Fiction Editing, or something else?

Possibly, but Google Search is a tricky beast to master and shifts the goalposts often in a bid to thwart those who’d use black-hat SEO techniques rather than genuine attempts to be interesting and discoverable online.
​
Basil is left with choosing between the following:

Basil Rhoueny | Academic Proofreading Services

Basil Rhoueny Editorial

Responsible Editing

​There are good arguments for the SEO-friendliness of the first two, and the flexibility of the third. My view is that any would work because they are true to his business’s brand identity in different ways.

What’s right for you?
Basil’s brand identity and your brand identity will not be the same because you and Basil are individuals, each with your own businesses, ideal clients, goals, hopes, dreams and passions. The decisions you make will therefore be different to the one Basil makes. That’s fine.

Will there be a perfect solution? Unlikely. There will be choices to be made.

You might decide it would be to your advantage to have a short name rather than a long one.

You might choose a little SEO clickbait over humour.

You might choose a punny name over a more straightforward business name.

You might opt for flexibility over specificity.

You might choose memorability at the expense of spellability.

You might elect to incorporate the essence of your political or social values.

What’s important is that you choose a business name that you feel comfortable with: one that reflects your brand identity and nudges your ideal clients towards an awareness of the kind of editor you are and why you’ll be a great fit with them; one that alludes to what you do.

Here are just a few of my favourites:

A Novel Edit: Beth Hill specializes in helping authors prepare for submission to agents and publishers. The gentle and humorous play on words in her business name evokes a sense of freshness and vision.

Enigma Editorial: Cally Worden specializes in editing mystery, crime and thrillers. Her business name tells us what she's passionate about. It's also short and snappy, and avoids cliche.

Denise Cowle Editorial: Denise specializes in editing non-fiction for businesses and publishers. Her surname is unusual, and her business name capitalizes on this. We know immediately who we're dealing with, and that makes it personal.

Le Mot Juste: Sarah Patey specializes in non-fiction editing and translation. The business name reflects her language skills and her commitment to detail and accuracy.

Liminal Pages: Sophie Playle specializes in editing speculative fiction. Her business name reflects the pushing of boundaries that exists within the novels she works on. It's also sounds elegant to my ear.

Radical Copyediting: Alex Kapitan specializes in helping authors and publishers use equitable and inclusive language. The business name reflects Alex's values and includes some SEO functionality.

Wordstitch Editorial: Hazel Bird specializes in non-fiction editing and editorial project management. Her business name embodies a sense of editing as a craft, and evokes a strong sense of her commitment to detail and precision.

It’s likely your choice will not be clear cut. Try not to get bogged down by that. Business names alone will not make you visible or discoverable. The compromises you make can be offset by other business-promotion activities that strengthen your online presence.

Happy naming!

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with independent authors of commercial fiction, particularly crime, thriller and mystery writers.
​
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and an Associate Member of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA).

Novels and screenplays are two very different art forms. When a story is presented to a reader as if it were something being watched in a cinema or on TV, the book begins to wobble.

Great screenwriters can be great novelists, but being the former doesn’t guarantee the latter.

Description and dialogue
When a novelist approaches their story as if it’s going to be watched, the narrative and dialogue can become overwritten.

In TV shows and movies, characters do lots of quite mundane things – walking into and out of rooms, opening and shutting doors, scratching their heads, putting the kettle on, wringing their hands, frowning, standing up, sitting down, walking over to windows and gazing out of them, picking up tea cups or beer bottles and taking a sip or a slug.

They say hello and goodbye, and hmm, mmm, er, um and aah as they talk to each other and themselves.

All this stuff happens quickly and provides a backdrop to the main action and dialogue. Sometimes there’ll be a backing track to assist with mood creation.

Some of that mundane stuff can go into a novel, but when it’s replicated in full it can be tedious to read and does nothing to drive the novel forward.

We pull into a garage the approximate dimensions of a college gymnasium—is that judging?—and park. He leads me through a side door and down into what some homes call a basement, but this one has a theater room and wine cellar, so we need to find a new term. Lower level, maybe? He heads into a small room and flicks on a switch. In the back right corner, there is a four-foot-high old-fashioned safe with a big dial.
“You’re not the cop on the case, right?”
This is the third time David has asked me that. “No. Why is that a big deal?”
He bends down and starts fiddling with the dial. “Hank asked me to hold something for him.”

Example: description and dialogue in a screenplay
If we were watching that on TV, we’d be shown a great deal more.​

We’d the see colour of the garage, the material it’s constructed from, the car pulling up and stopping.

The driver would switch off the engine, then both men would undo their seatbelts, exit the car, close their doors and walk to the garage. One would open the side door and they’d both walk through as the door closed behind them. Then they’d walk down the steps, reach the door of the basement and open it.

Once in the room, David would flick the light switch, walk over to the safe, bend down, move the dial, left, then right, then left again.

The camera might flip from the concentration on his face and the beads of sweat on his forehead to the way his trousers pull down over his backside as he bends.

We might watch and hear his laboured breathing or the slight grunt he lets out as he works.

He might scratch his face, touch his hair, purse his lips, or look up at the other man (Nap).

Nap, meanwhile, would be doing a bunch of things with his own body.

As for the conversation, either man might sigh, pause, stammer, belch or cough at any point, and at no time would it moderate the pace of the film because the camera can show us many of these things simultaneously.

In his book, Coben omits almost all of that.

Instead, he lets the reader do the work. Good choice because all that stage direction would be boring to read. It could take a page to get through it all, maybe two, and none of it would drive the novel forward.

He gives us just enough to imagine the setting in our mind’s eye, then gets down to business with the interesting elements of the story.

He and we know that no one’s walking through doors spectre-like; they need to be opened and shut. No one’s leaving the car running; the engine will be switched off. And natural speech invariably includes noise and pause.

Example: overwriting in a novel
Here’s my mangled example of how that might have looked if the detail of the screen version had been written into the novel. There are 421 words.

We drive along the road, turn left into a treelined side street, pull up in front of a garage the approximate dimensions of a college gymnasium—is that judging?—and park. The garage door has a red aluminum facia with a silver handle.David pushes a hand through his hair and looks at the garage. He remains still for a moment. I sense his anxiety, and my brow furrows in frustration as I follow his gaze.He takes his foot off the accelerator, shifts into neutral, and pulls on the handbrake. He pulls the key from the ignition and unhooks his seatbelt. I follow suit and open the passenger-seat door, close it, then walk around to meet him on the driver’s side. David gets out of the car and joins me on the sidewalk. He slams his door shut and turns. We walk toward the garage, me slightly behind, letting him show me the way.He leads me to a brown hardwood side door and stoops, fumbling the key in the lock. The door opens with a groan and we walk through to a dimly lit stairway. The door closes behind us. David goes first, leading me down into what some homes call a basement, but this one has a theater room and wine cellar, so we need to find a new term. Lower level, maybe?We reach the door at the bottom of the steps. David opens it and heads into a small room. He flicks on a switch. The light comes on and he turns, gesturing for me to enter. I do, and look around. In the back right corner, there is a four-foot-high old-fashioned safe with a big dial.“Um, you’re, er, not the cop on the case, right?” he says nervously.This is the third time David has asked me that. “Like I told you before, no.” I hesitate before asking, “Why is that a big deal?”He turns and walks toward the safe, bends down, and reaches for the dial with his hand. I watch as he fiddles with it, concentrating hard as he moves it first left, then right, then left again. I see sweat beading on his forehead. He stands, stretches, and wipes it off with the sleeve of his blue button-down shirt. As he lowers himself again and continues working the dial, his pants ride down over his ass.​He sighs as if he’s bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders. “Hank asked me to hold something for him,” he says.

Word dump
Writers who choose to write novels for viewers rather than readers risk adding ten, maybe twenty thousand words to their books that don’t need to be in there.

I’m not advocating removing description; I’m advocating writing for the page. That means making sure that the description is relevant rather than suffocating, enriching rather than boring.

If you have pages of characters making small talk about how they take their coffee over the noise the kettle’s making, that small talk needs to be central to the plot. So does the whistle of the kettle. And if it takes 500 words to get your character out of their car, there needs to be a reason for that.

If that information is just filler, give your reader the nudges they need and dump the rest into a box for when you write the screenplay version. Your director will the delighted!

Viewpoint characters
Viewpoint can unravel when a novelist approaches their story like a screenwriter.

When a novelist selects a viewpoint character for a section or chapter of their book, the reader will experience the story through that character’s perspective – what they see, smell, hear, touch and think.

Viewpoint characters allow the reader to immerse themselves in the moment, and for that reason they’re tremendously enriching.

Example: viewpoint on the screen
Imagine watching this short scene on TV:

One of the characters, Matt, ducks under a hedge. We seem him grimacing, shutting his eyes tightly. Then the camera cuts to a close-up of the thorns in the hedge pressing into his head. Perhaps there’s a trickle of blood down one side of his neck.

The camera stays with Matt and we see him mouth the word ‘bitch’.

We hear the clip-clopping of heels, and the camera moves to a lone woman on a footpath in the garden – Adriana. She speaks into her phone, saying, ‘He can’t have gone far. Find him and take him out,’ then rubs her throat. She continues to talk, telling the person on the other end of the line that she’d had a skinful the previous night and is furious about Matt’s interference, which is all she needs because she feels like she has cold coming on.

The camera cuts to another character, John. He’s clad in black. We hear him reply to her, telling her not to worry, then watch as he peeks over a wall and sees Adriana.

The view shifts to Adriana. She’s putting her phone in her pocket. Her expression is one of anger and frustration.

We go back to John. He pulls down a balaclava and moves stealthily towards an area at the back of the house. He’s almost invisible in the darkness of the night but we see him in the shadows because the camera shows us where he is.

Now it’s back to Matt. He’s still hunched up in the hedge, eyes wide, body still.

The camera zooms out so that we can see Adriana moving ever closer to where Matt’s hiding. She’s getting nearer.

The view moves in on Adriana. We see her flinch and purse her lips. She hobbles just a little, then bends to adjust her shoe. The camera view tilts down to her feet and we see the redness of the skin where it’s rubbing against her stilettos.

The camera cuts to Matt, still in the hedge. But now he’s smiling, enjoying Adriana’s discomfort.

Notice that the viewer can’t know what anyone’s thinking unless we are told through dialogue or facial expression. Gesturing will fill in the gaps. A soundtrack will also create mood.

Example: confused viewpoint in a novel
What some beginner writers do is render the scene in a way that partially mimics the screen version. That’s because they’re familiar with how stories are presented on the TV or in film.

Matt ducked under the hedge beside the footpath. He counted silently, mouthing the words, focusing attention away from the hawthorn piercing the back of his neck and scalp. Heels clicked on the footpath close by. Adriana. Bitch.
‘He can’t have gone far. Find him and take him out,’ she said. Her throat felt swollen. 'Dammit, and to make things worse, I feel like I've got a cold coming on. Plus, I had a skinful last night.' And she’d needed it after that interfering prick Matt had started sticking his nose where it wasn’t wanted.
‘I hear you, Adriana. Don’t worry, we’ll find him,’ said John. He was standing by the north wall, clad head-to-toe in black. Hands grasping brick and flint, he hauled himself up and peeked over to see Adriana pocketing her phone. He pulled down his balaclava and stole south to cover the back, masked by the shadow of night.
Adriana was on the phone, Matt realized. That was good. It meant she was on her own.
Adriana continued down the path, getting closer to where Matt was hiding with every step. Patrolling the grounds in stilettos had been a bad idea. They were killing her feet.
​ Matt hoped so, after what she’d put him through.

The problem is that there are multiple viewpoints that force the reader to bounce from one character’s experience to another. We never invest in Matt, Adriana or John because as soon as we try to immerse ourselves in the experience of one of those people, we’re dragged into the head of another.

The result is a wonky hybrid of novel and screenplay. We know what everyone’s doing, thinking and seeing. It rips out the tension and destroys the structure of the scene.

Example: singular immersive viewpoint in a novel
If, however, the writer commits to the viewpoint of one character, the prose is very different. In this version, we lose John completely. Adriana is visible but only from Matt’s perspective. We don’t have access to her thoughts, only what Matt thinks might be going on in her head based on what he knows, sees and hears.
​
It’s shorter, certainly, but the tension is back and the writing is tighter.

Matt ducked under the hedge beside the footpath. He counted silently, focusing attention away from the hawthorn piercing the back of his neck and scalp. Heels clicked on the footpath close by. Adriana.Bitch.‘He can’t have gone far. Find him and take him out.’Her voice was thick, like she was full of virus or hungover. Or maybe it was fury.
Matt heard a reply – a man speaking – but the sound was muffled and tinny.
She must be on the phone. That was good. She was on her own. For now.​Patent-black stilettos passed no more than a metre in front of him. The skin below both Achilles looked swollen and red. Those shoes must be killing her, he thought. He hoped so, after what she’d put him through.

Summing up
If you’re at the start of your writing journey, take care to craft words for the page, not for the screen. Keep the boring stuff out, even if it’s realistic. You’ll reduce your wordcount but enhance reader engagement.
​
Look to books written by your favourite novelists for inspiration on how to build a beautiful page, rather than the Netflix adaptations. Your writing will be all the better for it, I promise.

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with independent authors of commercial fiction, particularly crime, thriller and mystery writers.
​
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and an Associate Member of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA).

If you’ve made yourself visible enough to be asked to quote, that quotation needs to sparkle with value. A poor response is just poor marketing. Here are some ideas about how to offer compelling quotes that go beyond the fee.

Why quoting is a part of marketing1. You’re not alone
It’s never been easier or quicker to find an editor and get a quotation. That’s great news because any one of us can make ourselves visible. That’s just the first step, though.

Your author has probably asked more than one editor to quote. And so they should have. They’re trying to find the best-fit editor – someone with the right skills, experience, availability, fee structure, and personality.

And just because you’ve made the final three, five, ten (or whatever) doesn’t mean any of you will get the gig. If none of you float the client’s boat, they’ll head back to the search engines and directories in a jiffy. There are plenty more editing fish in the sea.

Never forget the competition when you’re quoting. You’re not alone; you’re one among thousands. Standing out is essential.

​2. Is the author really just asking for a quote?
Most of us have been interviewed at some time. Questions are asked and we respond. But we’re not assessed just on the words that come out of our mouths.

The interviewer(s) will also be influenced (even unintentionally) by how we smile; what we’re wearing; whether we seem friendly, confident and engaged; whether we arrive in a timely manner; and the degree to which the answers we deliver reflect the CV we submitted.

It’s the same when we respond to quotation requests. Our authors, too, will be influenced by the engagement we show, the speed of our response, the tone we use, and whether that matches what they were expecting.

Imagine you and I have just sat down in a restaurant. You ask me what my favourite chocolate is. My response is one of the following:

‘Lindt.’

‘I absolutely love Lindt. It’s delicious. Just thinking about it brings to mind Christmas when I was a kid.’

‘Lindt is my top choice. That company sources high-quality beans from sustainable cocoa-farming programmes.’

If all you want to know is what my favourite chocolate is, then (1) answers the question. But if we’re chatting over dinner, I’m not exactly helping the conversation along. You might think me rather dull. You might be texting Uber. You might already have your coat on.

The other two responses tell you something more about me. Answer (2) might evoke a sense of warmth and openness. Answer (3) might evoke a sense of my political and environmental values. Either way, both show that I’m interested in your question, that I’m prepared to give thought to it.

And maybe I can hold off your Uber text for just a little longer.

Our responses to requests to quote need to demonstrate engagement and thoughtfulness too. Getting a cab with Uber is quick. Deleting an email is quicker.

3. You might be able to change their mind
Perhaps the author’s done their editor search with the intention of sourcing three hundred quid’s worth of proofreading within the next month. Based on the sample you’ve assessed, you think it needs seven hundred pounds’ worth of copyediting. Plus, you’ve got a wait list of six months.

You don’t know what the author’s budget is but that’s not what matters. What matters is that they do, and it’s way lower than what’s in the email you’ve just sent them. And the time frame is just wrong.

When you add value, you might be able to change their mind. Maybe they’ll say:

‘I’d planned to have this turned around within the next few weeks, but you’ve blown me away. You’re worth waiting for.’

Or:

‘I’ll be honest – that’s a lot more than I’d budgeted for. However, you’ve really nailed what I’m struggling with, and I think you’re worth it.’

4. Or they might become your champion
Sometimes you won’t be able to change the author’s mind because the budget or the timing just isn’t right. But that doesn’t mean you won’t stay top of mind. Perhaps they’ll say:

‘I really, really need to get this out now, so I’m going to walk away. But I want you to know that I would have loved you to edit my book. Here’s a testimonial.’

Or:

‘I’m really sad that I can’t afford you. You’re worth every penny. Next time I’ll plan ahead and save up.’

And even though they haven’t hired you, they’ll still be your champion. Perhaps they’ll tell another writer about you, or maybe they will plan ahead with the next book and save up for you.

When you add value, you’re not just quoting for this job, you’re quoting for future jobs too.

5. You’re dealing with people who don’t know youIf you’ve been contacted by someone who’s never met you before, trust issues are already in play. For the less experienced author, sourcing editing can feel like a high-risk venture.

‘My problem is one that's all too common across all aspects of the indie publishing landscape. The barriers to entry are few (a website) and the options available to a customer to confirm or verify quality are limited and poor, short of taking a test drive.’

We need to help potential clients confirm or verify quality. Adding value is part of that process.

6. Your brand is at stake
Responses to quotation requests need to be on-brand. Branding is not just about having an eye-catching logo. It’s about conveying the essence of what you stand for at every touchpoint of your business – from your website and business cards to your emails and invoices.

There’s little point in having a compelling website if your quotation responses are forgettable or off-putting.
​
Whether your passion lies in editing for students, academics, corporates, or novelists, your quotations need to reflect that passion. Offering value – something beyond ‘This is what it will cost and when I can do it’ – is one way of reinforcing that brand identity and moving away from an any-old-editor mentality.

How to add value to the quote1. Include a digital swag bag of relevant hero resources
Let’s imagine your evaluation of the sample indicates problems with dialogue tagging and viewpoint.

What if, in addition to telling the author your price and availability, you gave them two free booklets that offer guidance on how they might rectify those problems in the book you’re quoting for or their future writing.

Even if those booklets are on your website, don’t assume the author has downloaded them. Maybe they didn’t get round to it, or perhaps they found you through a different platform.

Hero content adds value in multiple ways:
​

It demonstrates engagement and thoughtfulness – you’re showing you understand what the client’s problems are, and are providing solutions.

It offers proof of expertise – you have the knowledge, and that helps to build trust.

It stands out – most editors don’t offer free booklets or free resources.

2. Do a small sample, even if you haven’t been asked to
Even if you usually charge for sample line/copyedits or proofreads of a thousand or so words, consider doing a short one for free. This delivers value in the form of:

Engagement and thoughtfulness – you’re giving the author something valuable that they can measure or use for comparative purposes.

Expertise – you’re demonstrating your abilities; showing the difference it would make if the client were to choose you.

3. Provide a teeny critique
Another option is to offer a mini critique of the sample they’ve sent. I’m not suggesting a five-page report, but rather a few paragraphs that summarize the main problems as you see them, illustrated with a few examples.

As with the free short sample edit, it’s something they can use, and it demonstrates your knowledge of and engagement with their craft.

This is an opportunity to show not only how you’d get under the skin of the writing, but also how working with you would push the author’s project forward.

​4. Be a little personal
How about including a personal snippet that responds to something in their enquiry that truly resonated with you?

Perhaps they mentioned being inspired by a love of a particular author’s published works. If you’re a fan, too, tell them.

Maybe they told you this is their first novel. If you’re an editor who’s written fiction, tell them so, and include a few words to show that you understand what it’s like to start out on the writing journey.

Did something about the premise of their novel really stand out for you in the sample? Maybe you’ve visited a place they mentioned, or have a personal fascination with an aspect of the life/culture/society/history etc. that their story touches on.

If they’ve expressed concerns about anything – fear of being edited, confidentiality, new-author nerves, then express your empathy and address those issues with solutions.

Whatever you choose to communicate, remember that it’s a small personal connector that says, ‘I get you.’

Don’t make it up. It must be genuine ... the thing that excites you and reflects your desire to invest in the book. When we feel that itch, we’re starting on a journey too, one that compels us to do a standout job. Communicating this in some small way can help you to earn the author’s trust.

5. Show your enthusiasm
Don’t forget to make sure that you sound like you want the job! ‘This is what is will cost and when I can do it’ won’t inspire confidence in any author who’s even slightly nervous about working with an author … not on its own.

If, like me, you love your job, and think it’s a privilege to get paid for doing something you love, use language that conveys that passion. Tell your potential clients that you want to work with them, that you’d relish the chance help them with their writing journey.

Talk to them about the price and your availability, of course. That’s what was asked for and it must be front and centre.

That’s where you should start … because when it comes to the fee you’re offering, it’s not enough to think, I’m worth that. Worth has to be proved. And in a noisy, global online market, that takes effort.

If that effort helps you secure the opportunities to work for your ideal clients, it’ll be time well spent. An editor with no work is not running a business; they’re unemployed. Every minute we spend adding value to our quotations is an investment in employment and business ownership.

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with independent authors of commercial fiction, particularly crime, thriller and mystery writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and an Associate Member of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA).

Will your reader immerse themselves in your crime novel’s setting? Will the world you’ve built make sense, even if it’s a work of fantasy? And is it coherent? If you’re not sure, create a wiki.

A world-building wiki will help you keep track of your novel’s environment and the rules that govern it. And that will go some way to protecting your plot and maintaining a logical narrative.

‘But I write crime, not fantasy ...’Even if your novel’s setting is the world as we know it right now, a world-building wiki is still useful.

I live in a hamlet in Norfolk (the UK one). Some of the things I have to deal with in my day-to-day life are different to those of friends who live only ten miles away in the city of Norwich.

For example, they’re connected to mains drainage. I, however, have to book the honey pot man to come and empty the septic tank once a year! Normal for me; weird for others.

And then there’s my local pal. He has the same drainage issues, but his working day is very different to mine. He’s a police officer. His work takes him directly into situations that I’m familiar with only at a distance, through the crime fiction I edit and the shows I watch on TV.

Want to know what a honey pot man is? Read this!

How does all of this relate to fiction writing?

​One of my author clients bases his books in the Colorado Rockies. I know the lie of the land – how the weather affects the local population on a seasonal basis, how the pine smells in the spring, how the mountain passes are treacherous in the winter.

Then there’s the town where the sheriff’s office is located. And it is a sheriff rather than a chief constable who’s in charge of this fictional county’s law enforcement. I know about the guns people carry, the idiomatic turns of phrase they use, and where they tuck their chewing tobacco when they speak.

I live five thousand miles away and have never visited this region of the US, and yet I swear if I drove into that town with a flat tyre, I could locate the garage and a find place to grab a latte while the mechanic was fixing my car – without having to ask a soul.

And that’s because my author is a great world-builder.
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He writes crime thrillers, but he never forgets that most of his readers aren’t cops; that many don’t even live in the US, never mind near the Colorado Rockies; and that no one lives in Rocky Points … because he made it up.

Chris Brookmyre, Orbit, 2018

China Miéville, Pan, 2011

C.J. Sansom, Pan, 2015

Environments of the not-now and the not-here
Crime fiction is as versatile a genre as any other. For not-here, think about Chris Brookmyre’s Places in the Darkness. The Ciudad de Cielo space station makes the Colorado Rockies seem like a mere hop. It’s crime fiction, but spacey!

For not-now, how about C. J. Sansom’s Shardlake series. It’s crime fiction but the Tudor world in which our lawyer-detective operates bears little resemblance to that of a modern detective.

And then there’s China Miéville’s not-here and not-now The City & The City. It’s a richly gritty world of hardboiled crime fiction where things don’t work in quite the same way. However, the narrative feels utterly reliable.

All three authors are fine crime-writing world-builders, and their plots never unravel because the worlds they’ve shown us work.

Your wiki and your plot
Not everything in your wiki has to end up in your book, but all of the information will help you keep track of who’s who, what’s where, and how. That means you can keep the environment(s) in which your story is set coherent.

Furthermore, if you decide to write a series, your wiki will help you maintain consistency across books. Even if you switch to a new location, even a new planet, and different rules come into play, it’s a space in which you can record the additional information and keep yourself on track.

Let’s look at some of the elements you might include in your crime wiki.

Physical environment
Where does your story take place and how will the geography, geology and climate play with your plot? Does the landscape or the weather restrict or empower your characters, and if so, how?

Real or fantastical, every world must obey its own scientific laws. Continuity is key, and your wiki will help you stay on track.

Imagine your protagonist’s partner dies because the paramedic’s oxygen tank is empty, but they live on a world where the population breathes mainly nitrogen. Even your characters’ inhalations can blow a hole in your plot if you don’t keep track of the rules of your physical environment.
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If you’re setting a story in a real place that you’ve not visited, the wiki is where you record the details you’ll need to stop pedantic locals getting the hump when your hero sprints from the Tube station at Amersham to the next stop on the line. Chalfont & Latimer looks close by on the London Underground map, but trust me, it’s not for sprinting. Embankment to Charing Cross, yes!

Culture, language and faithUse your wiki to record the ideas, customs, belief systems and social behaviours that distinguish your world, and how those will impact on your characters. Record also how your characters speak, and whether they are out of place in the setting, or fully integrated.

Consider how historical cosy crime narratives find clever ways to enable characters who are restricted by socio-economic or gender disparities typical of the eras they’re set in.

A good example is Emily Brightwell’s Mrs Jeffries. She’s a Victorian housekeeper who nimbly engineers a higher quality of detection than her boss, the hapless Inspector Witherspoon, would be capable of without the help of his domestic staff.

Emily Brightwell, Constable, 2018

How will you reflect the way people speak in your world? Do people from the region in which the novel’s set have a particular idiom or dialect, and will you express this just through dialogue or in the narrative too?

Will you offer nudges here and there or include it consistently and heavily throughout the book?
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It goes without saying that if you include phrasing in a language you’re not fluent in, get it checked by someone who is. Google Translate is not the tool of choice here.

Rules of governance
Record who’s in control and how the rule of law works in your novel’s setting. If you’re mimicking reality, there might be variations not just between countries but also between states, counties, provinces or municipalities.

Who makes the law? Who upholds it? What powers do they have? What are their titles? Who are they accountable to? What are the checks and balances that restrict them? And what does sentencing and punishment look like in the world you’ve created?

How about the rules of engagement and the customary notifications given to characters apprehended by law enforcement? If a right-to-silence warning is given to a suspect arrested in the UK, and it’s referred to as a Miranda warning, your narrator’s reliability will be compromised. The term ‘caution’ is used in this neck of the woods.

Make notes about the way the jurisprudence system works, and the rights of your world’s citizens in the locations you situate them. For example, time and place will determine how long a person can be held without access to legal representation, and how they might be punished if they’re found guilty of a crime.

If your story is taking place in a fantastical setting, you can decide how all of this works. Still, your wiki will ensure there’s continuity in the way you apply your fictional rule of law to your characters.

Science, technology, engineering and medicine ... and guns
Your wiki is the perfect place to record essential information about science, tech and weaponry – what it is, how it works, who has access to it and what it’s used for.

If you’re going for authenticity, make notes about how it works in the real world. How heavy is a Glock 19, and can a suppressor be attached to the barrel? What noise does a suppressed gun really make – is it just a pop or something louder?

Years ago, I read a novel by a very well-known fantasy and horror writer. One of the subplots hinged on the DNA of a set of identical twins – one egg, one sperm, one zygote, which had split into two embryos. They had almost identical DNA. Only they didn’t because our twins were different sexes. That meant they were fraternal, not identical. The only thing they’d shared was a womb. A technical error pulled the plot to pieces.

Food, drink and dress
What do people eat and drink in this world, and how do they dress?

Are there foodstuffs or materials that are restricted, impractical, unaffordable or impossible to access for some or all of the characters in your world?

Does what people eat and how they dress indicate something about their status, their identity, their belief system, and what are the norms and rules surrounding their choices?

Even if this information isn’t integral to the plot, it can still help your reader immerse themselves in your narrative as they experience the colours, textures, tastes and smells of the world in which your characters are moving.

Heterogeneity in homogeneityAs with real life, just because a group of people share a location, a job, a faith, doesn’t mean they’re all the same.

Unless homogeneity is central to the plot, it can suck the soul from a novel because it’s unusual.

Michael J. Sullivan’s Hollow World is a mystery thriller set in the future where a person’s physical appearance is determined by their job. That doesn’t stop him looking for ways to distinguish the members of his worker groups – through belief systems, styles of dress, hobbies and passions, even the way they move and smile.
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Use your wiki to record which differences and similarities make sense in your world, and how you will reflect them.

Michael J. Sullivan, Tachyon, 2014

Any other quirks
Record information about any other quirks that are story-specific in a miscellaneous section.

I nearly came undone with my own writing when embarking on a piece of flash fiction centred around where I live in Norfolk. During my research into pheasant shooting, I found out that my wee tale had come undone before I’d put a word on the page.

Initially, I’d centred my plot around a crime being ignored during the summer because of the gunshots from legal pheasant-shooting parties. ​